Mercury Fallen News

Thank you all for the amazing support. I mentioned in my previous developer log that my father was in the hospital after having a heart attack. He is now post heart surgery and recovery is going well.

This has understandably slowed down development a bit, but I'm still working on some new features as well.



I'm currently adding an action success chance to job roles. This will add more challenge and variety as each job role, and it's relevant actions, will have a chance to succeed or fail. Success chance is based on the jobs level as well as colonist attributes. A colonist with a low success chance for a job will be slower at that job as they will fail more. Each time a colonist fails there is also a small chance for them to critically fail.

Critical failure will result in various bad things happening depending on the action. For example, if a colonist critically fails at construction then the object being constructed is destroyed, losing the materials put into it in the process.



New positive and negative icons will appear above the colonist as they perform actions. This helps to show their work speed as well as how often they succeed or fail.

Colonist success chance will also be affected by stress. Higher stress will decrease their over all success chance.


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Update 19 brought Steam Workshop support for translations and mods. There are some great mods already available. While I do plan to add further support for modding, I’m currently working on some new content and features.


Storage containers are being updated to support custom colors as well as visual capacity meters. This affects the storage container, food dispenser and the fridge.


Pseudo-random and conditional events are in development. While there will be some random events, the events will mostly be tied to conditional factors and colonist story events.

Conditional factors such as hungry colonists, low fuel, high stress, etc may trigger events to occur that will affect colonists and/or the environment in positive or negative ways.

Colonist story events are random events that will allow you to make a direct choice in what happens. A colonist may make a specific request, find something or have an idea on how to improve something. How you decide to handle these events will allow for further positive or negative effects.


The tutorial system was designed as a general getting started guide. My plan is to expand the tutorial system into a more robust objectives/mission system. This new system will still offer initial objectives to help new players get started, but will have further objectives as you progress in the game.

The goal is to offer both optional/minor objectives as well as story objectives.


The larger project in development, and planned since the beginning, is the creation of expedition stories. New points of interest (POI) on the planet map will be explore-able with colonists. Exploring a POI will offer additional player choices. The result will depend on the colonists that are brought and the choices you make. POI locations will be a new way of gaining additional discoveries, rare items, resources and more.


I generally do my best to keep my business and personal existence separate, but development has been slowed down a bit recently do to a personal event.

My father is currently in the hospital after having multiple heart attacks. Further medical complications have also arisen and now it’s just a waiting game to see how he improves

Given there isn’t much I can do at this point, working on Mercury Fallen helps keep me distracted and, mostly, lowers my stress.



Development continues and I look forward to your thoughts on some of these new features.

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Howdy Pioneers!

A hot fix for Update 19 has just been uploaded to fix a game breaking issue with the new planet map display modes. The planet map interface was no longer functioning after installing the map display modes equipment item in the map table after loading a saved game.

This should now be fixed. My apologies for any inconvenience and keep that feedback coming. :)

Howdy Pioneers!

Update 19 is now live! A big thank you to those that helped test the new mod system. A special thank you to Ellmite for helping track down a lot of hard coded language strings and the first translation mod on the Steam Workshop.


Official Mod integration is here and supports translations and gameplay tweaks. The Steam Workshop has been integrated into the new Mod Manager interface. Mod creators can upload their mod to the workshop and users can subscribe to mods on the Workshop for use in their game.

Want to create a mod for Mercury Fallen? Check out the Modding Guide.



A new piece of equipment can be crafted and installed into the Map Table to to unlock display modes. The new display modes visualize data for discovered biomes, temperature, elevation, moisture and available resources.


Part of the focus of adding mod support is to enable the creation and usage of language translations. While the core game includes English, the Steam Workshop is available for players to create and use language mods for additional languages.

If using a language mod be sure to change the active language in settings after the mod is enabled in the Mod Manager. A German Translation of the game is available on the Workshop with more languages to follow.

If you’re interested in translating the game, please check out the Language Translation Guide.




Additions

• Added mod support for loading/managing user created mods
  
• Added Steam Workshop support
  
• Added Mods button to main menu to open Mod Manager interface
  
• Added Language setting. English is the only default option, but supports user language mods.
  
• Added display modes to surface map interface. Must install new craftable equipment item in map table.
  

Changes

• Game now pauses when Steam Overlay is open
  
• Updated look of in game menu
  
• Small UI Scale setting is a little bigger
  
• Large UI Scale setting is a little smaller
  
• Can now cancel vehicle construction in Vehicle Assembly Station
  
• Enable/Deconstruct buttons on object panel now icon buttons with tooltips
  
• Warning icons over objects are centered over object instead of offset in some instances
  
• Changed how water is generated in when starting a new map
  

Fixes

• Fixed: Selected colonists in roster no longer selected when opening roster management list
  
• Fixed: UI HUD inventory item names overlap when wrapped to a second line
  
• Fixed: Broken/Missing language string references for various UI elements
  
• Fixed: Vehicle/Facility info panel still showing when changing from planet map to another tab on the facility management screen.
  
• Fixed: Major lag spikes related to power/water conduits
  
• Fixed: Minor lag spikes related to minimap updates
  

Hope everyone is having a great new year so far. I have some big plans for 2019. First up is an update that focuses on bringing initial mod support to Mercury Fallen.


The next update will add in official support for XML mods that can tweak existing content or add new content such as additional languages. Mods that add new artwork and Steam Workshop support are currently being investigated, but may not make it into this update. This is only the beginning, and further support will be added in future updates.



A Test Build will be available next week for those who want to test mod support. Your feedback will be very helpful in identifying what the community wants and needs. Additional information and guides will be made available for those interested in creating or using mods.



While mod support is the major focus of Update 19, I've also added new display modes for the surface map. The Discovered Biomes display mode shows discovered biomes in green and undiscovered biomes in red. This will help explorers track down missing biomes.

Additionally there are display modes for temperature, moisture and elevation. While these tile attributes are not critical at the moment, they will play a part in some of the planned content in development.

What type of mods do you want to see? If you're interested in creating mods for Mercury Fallen, please reach out and let me know the types of mods you want to create. Thank you all for a great 2018 and I look forward to creating some exciting new content in 2019!